Housing

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

May I urge the right hon. Gentleman to expand his remarks to cover areas beyond London and the south-east? As a Leeds MP, he will know as well as I do that there is not a housing bubble there, and that house prices are not running away. The Help to Buy scheme is making a real difference, because the price of a house in my constituency—and in many parts of his constituency—is eight to nine times more than the average salary in those areas. The scheme is really helping people there. He has made the point that prices are increasing in London, but will he please ensure that this debate is about more than just London and the south-east?

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly fair point. As he knows, the housing market varies enormously between different parts of the country. In the city that he and I have the privilege of representing, the council’s assessment—which is supported by all the parties—is that we will need roughly 70,000 new homes in the next 15 years. That is a question of supply.

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[Mr Pickles]

The hon. Gentleman needs to look a little outside London given where he represents. He could even look in some parts of London. Newham, for example, saw a drop of just under 1% in house prices. If we take out the London figures—figures for parts of London can be very spectacular—and look at the rest of the country, we will see that the increase in house prices has been very modest indeed. Not even in London have the figures reached where they were in 2007, so to talk about a housing bubble is ridiculous.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

As I tried gently to prod the shadow Secretary of State during his contribution, may I now say that I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for moving the debate beyond London and the south-east to areas in which my constituency and those of a great many of my hon. Friends are based?

[Mr Pickles]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that. Our long-term economic plan is helping to pay off the deficit, keep interest rates down and let the housing market recover.

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[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

I will focus my remarks on my constituency and on Leeds. The housing stock obviously needs to be increased, but I have taken issue with the Leeds core strategy and the amount of housing it says needs to be built over the next 15 years. The university of Leeds—that august institution is in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn)—has stated that building 70,000 houses in Leeds would not be completed until 2060, which raises the question: why should they be built over the next 15 years? There is therefore an argument to be had about housing figures in different parts of the country.

I totally disagree with the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell), who is no longer in his place, about villages needing to expand to cope with the housing crisis. One of the major pieces of legislation that this Government have brought in introduces neighbourhood plans, which allow people in the villages in a local area to say, “If we want our village to survive—the little local shop to carry on, the pub to survive, continued use of the village hall, and so on—we need to invest in housing.” People in some of my villages may feel that we need more bungalows for elderly people, while those in other villages may feel that there is not enough affordable housing and that we need to build two-bedroom terraced homes that would help young people to stay in the village where they were brought up.

The problem that we have in Leeds and in my constituency is that as soon as these plans are proposed, the developer says, “Well, that’s very good, but actually I want to build not 20 houses there but 200 or 400 houses.” That would completely change the nature of the villages in my constituency. Leeds city council has deemed that the constituency overall has to take 1,200 houses. If we put that in the context of there being 41,000 houses to start with, we can see that it represents an enormous expansion. Under these plans, the villages of Micklefield and Kippax and the town of Garforth will all blend into one huge development. I believe that the figures are wrong, as I said when I gave evidence on the core strategy, and if I had more time I would expand on that. However, the local authority has the power to identify more sensibly where larger-scale developments could go.

I am unashamed to say on the record that I support the idea of freeing up land in the northern part of my constituency in an area called Headley Fields, which is out towards the parish of Bramham, the village that I reside in, although nowhere near it. That land could take the housing allocation for the next 15 years proposed by Leeds city council. Because it was there and could be planned from day one, proper infrastructure such as transport facilities, pubs, schools, and doctors surgeries could be put in place. At the moment we face the problem of 5,000 houses coming in through what I call death by a thousand cuts—putting 400 houses into a village here and 400 houses into a village there. That would mean that not enough would come out of the new homes bonus to provide the extra facilities, such as the local schools, that were needed.

I do not believe that we should build garden cities, but there is certainly an argument for building new villages in areas and not expanding the existing villages. Planning as a whole in order to have the necessary facilities built in those villages is a better way forward than adding developments on to each village. The neighbourhood plans that this Government have empowered local communities to use can then be put into full effect.

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[Kris Hopkins]

If it is the case that those representations have not been made, my hon. Friend may want to write to the Prime Minister. If that was my local council and my neighbouring council was going to raid my green belt and green spaces to facilitate housing in a neighbouring council, I would imagine that, like my hon. Friend, I would be extremely unhappy.

Despite the Opposition’s claims, it was under the previous Administration that house building fell to its lowest peacetime rate since the 1920s, with only 107,000 homes completed in 2010. They imposed regional targets on local communities as part of their top-down regime. Their approach is that Whitehall and Labour know better. The complete failure to invest between 1997 and 2010 resulted, as has been said, in some 427,000 fewer social houses. Under this Government, come 2015 there will be more social housing—something that Members recognise—and we can be extremely proud of that. In contrast to Labour’s record, we have given people local control of neighbourhood planning, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) has just said. I encourage local authorities that have not completed their local plan to get on with it, to engage with their local communities and give power to local individuals to shape their community, and to remove red tape.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my hon. Friend agree that all the Government’s progress in this Parliament in allowing local people to engage with local authorities on planning would be completely undermined by a Labour Government who would go back to the Stalinist tactic of land seizure and building wherever they want?

[Kris Hopkins]

It is clear, as an hon. Member said earlier, that localism is just paper thin for Labour. The number of first-time buyers is at a five-year high. Help to Buy has made a significant contribution, helping hard-working families to buy their own home; promoting quality and choice in the rented sector by bringing in private incentives and not just using expensive taxpayer subsidies; and helping small and medium-sized builders to get back on their feet—more than 1,000 registered builders are now supporting the Help to Buy equity scheme.